Reading Leviticus and Deuteronomy Again for the First Time in Decades

On Tuesday, before I went to the BOLD Justice rally, I read the texts that my off-lectionary church will be considering this Sunday:

Leviticus 19: 2, 9-18 and Deuteronomy 24: 10-21.

Just for fun I read the rest of the chapters that contain the readings. I was struck by all the rules and the laws. I expected to be overwhelmed: these books are famous for laying down the law.

But Tuesday night, as I read these chapters again for the first time in decades, I was struck by something new. The laws never get very far away from an ethics of care. We are leaving fruit on the vine so that the less fortunate have something to glean. We are allowed to take care of ourselves and our families. But we also have to take care of the less fortunate. And then we have a few laws on what can be mixed and what cannot (for example, not forcing the mating of different animals). And then it’s back to care for the immigrant, the widow, the poor, the child.

I drove to the BOLD Justice rally as I heard the news about the ways that the very wealthy broke laws to get their children into elite schools. It's an amazing tale of deceit, which shouldn't surprise me by now. I'm hearing talk of people who claimed that their children needed extra accommodations, which meant their child could have extra time on a test--in some cases, the person who was assisting the "disabled" student changed the test. There was even one person who took the test for another person. And there were sports records that were faked.

All sorts of thoughts swirled through my head about the way we treat our children, about the advantages we want for them, about what we will do to make sure they get as many advantages as possible. In this aspect, the rich are no different.

It was interesting to compare what we are doing with BOLD Justice to all the news we hear. There’s precious little news of people advocating for the less fortunate. Very few of us are going to great lengths for someone else’s children.

At the end of the rally, a group of us stayed with little Layton, while his mom Jeannine made her way back from the front of the sanctuary. I want to believe that any group of people would have done that, especially if they knew the child who had become separated from his mom. If I watch the news, it’s easy to believe that we’re quickly becoming immune to the cries of children who are separated from their parents.

Layton’s story is a happy one, but we all know that many children will not be that lucky. Even the wealthy parents who tried to make sure their children got an elite education were operating out of an ethics of care for their own children—that ethics got warped somewhere along the way, but it started in good intentions, I am sure.

But now, as in ancient times, not every child is that fortunate. Our earliest Biblical texts remind us that God expects us to care for the less fortunate. We aren’t expected to give everyone every kind of advantage; Leviticus and Deuteronomy talk about the correct way to treat slaves, after all. These texts aren’t calling us to radical redistribution of wealth and resources. But these texts remind us that we can be fair even if we can’t be equal. These texts call us to an ethics of care—and modern life reminds us of what happens when we abandon that ethics of care.